How Do I Design a Learner Centered Course

Designing (or redesigning) a course can feel overwhelming. It’s tempting to start by listing the topics you want to cover and then build your syllabus and lesson plans around them.But if your goal is to help students truly engage and make meaning of the content, give backward design a try.

Backward design is a powerful, evidence-informed approach that begins not with content, but with the essential questions that spark curiosity and guide meaningful student engagement (Wiggins & McTighe, 1998). From there, you work backward to design assessments that align with learning outcomes inspired by those big questions. This method helps ensure that students understand not just what they’re doing in the course, but why, and how each assignment supports their overall learning journey. Lastly, you consider and plan the learning activities that will help your students succeed on the assignments and in answering the essential questions.

Designing with the end in mind helps make your course more intentional, inclusive, and impactful. 

Strategies and Examples

Start With the End in Mind 

What Essential Questions Drive the Learning in your Course? Identify essential questions that will be addressed in your course to give you a better idea of the “big-picture” goals. Essential questions are the big, engaging, often complex questions in your discipline that spark curiosity, encourage exploration, and give your course purpose. 

Essential questions are:

• Open-ended and thought-provoking
• Connected to core concepts or themes in your field
• Designed to stimulate ongoing thinking and discussion
• Revisited throughout the course

Examples include:

• What makes a source trustworthy? (History)
• How does the structure of a substance affect what it can do? (Chemistry)
• What is justice? (Political Science)
• How do artists express identity through form? (Art)

Read how one UMass faculty member uses his essential questions in Physics all the way until the last day of class.

Clearly identify what you want students to know and be able to do by the end of the course by creating learning outcomes. Once you’ve identified your essential questions, you can begin to clarify what you want students to take away from your course. This is where learning outcomes (also called learning objectives) come in. Learning outcomes translate your big ideas into more specific, observable goals that help you align your teaching and assessment strategies. See our Guide “How Do I Get Started in Creating a Syllabus?” or use this handout for suggestions on how to write learning outcomes.

For example: 

• Essential Question: “How do stories shape how we see ourselves and others?” (Literature)

  Learning Outcome: “By the end of this course, students will be able to discuss how literature reflects and influences identity, culture, and social values”

• Essential Question: How do computers “think” and solve problems? (Computer Science)

  Learning Outcome: “By the end of this course, students will be able to explain how algorithms work and use them to solve simple problems

Design Assessments and Activities

How Will Students Show What They’ve Learned and How Can You Guide Them There. Designing assessments that align directly with your learning outcomes can allow students to meaningfully demonstrate their learning, make your course feel more cohesive to students, and ensure that you are actually assessing what you want students to be able to do or know. This doesn’t mean you need to build every quiz or activity right away. Start by focusing on the bigger assignments - the ones that matter most. 
Not ready to map out every detail? You can still take a valuable step by drafting the assignment sheet—one that clearly communicates the purpose, task, and criteria. The Transparency in Learning and Teaching (TILT) framework can help you do just that.
 

Questions to help guide your planning:

• What kinds of assignments, projects, or performances would best demonstrate the skills or knowledge of that you care about most?
• What are the major checkpoints where students will apply what they’ve learned?
• How will you use those assignments to give feedback and support growth?
   

Consider designing both formative assessments (low-stakes opportunities to practice, like in-class activities and homework) and summative assessments (final evaluation of mastery, like larger exams, papers, and projects).

For how-to guides on designing different kinds of assessments, see our How Do I...? page on Designing Assessments.

Design learning activities that build toward outcomes and prepare students for assessments. Now, finally, is the time to think about what you’re going to do during the class to help your students learn. This could include how you’d structure and organize lectures, what types of activities you can do inside and outside of class, and how you might scaffold activities and assignments across the course to help students achieve the course outcomes. 

The Power of Alignment: Making Sure it all Connects

Alignment is key. Well aligned courses are often perceived by students as more organized, transparent, engaging, and fair. Even small adjustments to alignment can support deeper learning (Hattie & Timperley, 2007).

Create an alignment table to check for alignment between outcomes, assessments, and activities. It can be helpful to explicitly map out your learning outcomes and the assessments and learning activities that are associated with them, as in the table below. This is a great way to see where you might need to develop learning activities to better help students practice before assessments and whether your assessments actually require integration of multiple learning goals (and thus might need more scaffolding).

Download a copy of an alignment table that you can use to help you plan your own course.

Periodically revisit your outcomes, assessments and learning activities. An important thing to remember is that course design does not happen linearly; it helps to look back and adjust as you go. Designing assessments can help you unearth new outcomes that you hadn’t thought of during your first round of brainstorming.  Regular reflection and revisions can make a big difference. As you plan, keep checking: 

• Do your assessments measure what matters?
• Do your learning activities help students succeed?

Remember, backward design is an iterative process.

Tying it Together: Use Your New Design to Guide Your Syllabus Creation

Create policies, schedules, and grading schemes based on your course design. Knowing what assignments and activities you will use and what scaffolding is needed will make it much easier to determine the important things you’ll need to communicate to students about how the class will be conducted by compiling everything into a cohesive syllabus. For example, decide on an equitable policy for in-class participation if you plan to use a lot of activities, or craft a policy on proper AI use if you plan to use written assignments. Plus, having all of your assignments in one place makes it easier to determine you grading scheme. See our Grading Resource Collection for ideas on how to determine grading policies and weights.

*Hot tip: make your syalbus even more effective by using evidence-based strategies to make your syllabus more inclusive.

• Wiggins, G. & McTighe, J. (1998). Understanding by design. Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development
• Hattie, J. & Timperley, H. (2007). The Power of Feedback. Review of Educational Research.
• Stapleton-Corcoran, E. (2023). “Backwards Design.” Center for the Advancement of Teaching Excellence at the University of Illinois Chicago. Retrieved 7/17/2025 from https://teaching.uic.edu/resources/teaching-guides/learning-principles-and-frameworks/backward-design